Introduction

As a second generation immigrant from the United States whose parents were born and brought up in India, I have always thought of myself as a blend of the cultures of both the United States and India. While I have grown up in the United States and therefore have had many “American” experiences and influences, my parents have always sought to keep me connected to my Indian roots and traditions. This has come in many forms, from celebrating cultural holidays, to going to the temple frequently, to visiting India as much as we can. But the most prominent connection I have had to India is through Indian entertainment. I grew up watching Indian movies with my family every weekend from not just Bollywood- but also the countless other film industries in India. Watching Indian movies is something I have genuinely loved doing since as long as I can remember. And with this, comes my love for Indian music. Many of the movies from India are musicals, and the songs are probably my favorite part of these movies. As someone who listens to music while doing almost anything, I listen to Indian music very frequently and I look forward to listening to it. Having said all of this about my love for Indian entertainment, I equally enjoy watching American content and listening to American music, especially throwbacks. My sister and I would spend hours watching Disney Channel and belting out the lyrics to American pop songs when we were younger, and today, I binge watch American TV shows more than I would care to admit, and I love listening to and discovering new American music.

Given my American and Indian experiences and habits when it comes to media consumption, I decided to take a look at both my Netflix streaming history and Spotify streaming history, the platforms that I primarily use for watching content and listening to music respectively, and compare myself to the top streaming habits of users from both the United States and India for these two platforms. I compared my Netflix streaming history, which I was able to download from my Netflix profile, to the weekly top 10 streamed movies and TV shows on Netflix in the United States and India. I was able to download this data from the Netflix Top 10 website, spanning from June 28th, 2021 to April 9th, 2023. I wanted to explore how much American content I consume compared to Indian content and how my viewing habits relating to this and other metrics, such as genre and ratings, may differ from the content that people have viewed the most on Netflix in the United States and India, as I think of myself as somewhat of an overlap between these two countries. Thus, I will only look at movies and shows that I have watched or are in either of these weekly top 10 charts that have been produced in only either India or the United States. While the main focus of my analysis is on Netflix streaming data, I also requested my account data from Spotify, and they sent me various files detailing my playlist, streaming history, and library data, among others. I decided to briefly focus on my streaming history, which is given from April 8th, 2022 until April 9th, 2023. I wanted to explore the distribution of Indian and American artists in my most streamed artists and how my top artists may change over time compared to the weekly top artists on Spotify in the United States and India. I was able to find this data on the Spotify Charts website and manually input it into a spreadsheet.

Netflix Plots

I first created the plot above that displays the percentage of unique content produced in India compared to the percentage of content produced in the United States for each streaming year across my Netflix history, the United States weekly top 10 content, and India weekly top 10 content. I found that although I started off watching a fairly equal proportion of American and Indian content, I started to watch significantly more Indian content in 2022 and continued to do so in 2023. I also found that the United States weekly top 10 chart had no content produced in India in both 2021 and 2023, and had one in 2022, which makes up 0.5% of the content on the chart that year. While the United States top content is very much dominated by American content, India’s weekly top 10 chart over the years has a variety of Indian and American content with the highest streams across the years, with a fairly higher percentage of American content on the chart in 2021 than Indian content, and fairly higher percentages of Indian content than American content in 2022 and 2023. Overall, the popular content being watched by Netflix users from India and in my streaming history seem to have more of a variety in being from the United States or India, while the United States top chart is almost exclusively made up of American content. This conclusion does make intuitive sense because American content is generally more well known and widely watched globally, while a lot of Indian content is generally watched by people living in India or those of Indian ethnicity living abroad.

The plot above displays the percentage of Indian content compared to the percentage of American content in each streaming year separated by whether the content is a movie or TV show across my streaming data, the United States weekly top 10 content, and the India weekly top 10 content. It seems as though I watched just slightly more Indian movies than American movies in 2021, but in 2022, I watched significantly more Indian movies, and in 2023, I watched exclusively Indian movies. As for shows, I watched exclusively American shows in 2021, but in 2022 and 2023, I watched a few more Indian shows, yet still fairly less than American shows. For the most streamed shows in the United States over the years, there was only one movie from India in 2022, while the rest of the movies were from the United States. The shows on the United States top chart have been made up of exclusively American content in comparison to Indian content over the years. For the most streamed content in India, however, there is a good mix of Indian and American content in both movies and shows, with Indian movies and American shows being more popular in recent years. Overall, in recent years, both my watch habits and the watch habits of Netflix users in India have gravitated towards Indian movies and American shows, while United States users have gravitated towards content from the United States.

The plot above presents the percentage distribution of some of the top genres in each month across my Netflix streaming history, the United States weekly top 10 content, and India weekly top 10 content. These genres include action, comedy, drama, romance, and thriller. It is important to note that these are the percentages across all genres, not just the ones listed– these other genres generally have less observations. For the content that I have watched, comedy and drama have generally higher percentages in the respective months, although there are fluctuations because at certain points I would watch less of those genres and at certain points I would watch more– this applies to the other genres as well. Compared to other genres, I watched a lot more comedy towards the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, and I watched a greater percentage of drama content in April of 2022 and February of 2023. I watched slightly more romance and thriller content towards the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, but I have barely watched any action content during this time period. For the highest streamed content in the United States, there are less action, romance, and thriller proportions across the months as compared to drama, which has a higher presence towards the middle of 2022, and comedy, which fluctuates across the months. For the highest streamed content in India, drama seems to have a higher presence, especially towards the middle of 2022 and then gradually decreases. Comedy starts off high in July of 2021 and fluctuates over time. Similarly to the United States weekly top 10 chart, romance and thriller content have very low distributions across the months. Action also fluctuates in its distribution over time. I would say that this plot highlights that my viewing habits when it comes to genre do not line up with the general viewing habits of the majority of people in the United States and India, which are quite similar, and I have scattered watching patterns, as the genres I watch the most have a lot of dips to 0, meaning I didn’t watch any content of that genre during that month. Although this plot does not have to do with the production country of the content I watch, I did want to see how my viewing habits compare to people from both the United States and India across different metrics, and this plot has helped me to do so.

This plot compares the average IMDb score for the content from India and the content from the United States for every year as well as every month. The average IMDb score by year for the Netflix content I have watched is generally higher by around 1 IMDb point for American content than Indian content, but it seems to be slightly increasing for Indian content and slightly decreasing for American content. For the monthly version of this subplot, I see more fluctuations for both the countries’ content and it signifies that it’s not a linear progression. The average IMDb score by year for the Netflix content highly streamed in the United States is fairly stagnant at 6.9 for content produced in the United States, and although the one Indian title has an IMDb score of 7.9, it is just one title and probably doesn’t represent the other Indian content’s IMDb scores well enough. The monthly view of this subplot also shows a fairly stagnant trend for the average IMDb score of United States content, and the same Indian title is shown with the same IMDb score across two months. The average IMDb score by year for the highly streamed Indian content is fairly similar for American content and Indian content, with overlap in 2021 and 2023 and the United States having a slightly higher average IMDb score in 2022. The monthly view of this subplot reiterates this, as it shows a peak average IMDb score at 8.1 for American content in June of 2022. This plot shows that the average IMDb score by year is slightly higher for American content in both my content and the highly streamed content in India, but it is important to note that there are month to month fluctuations that aren’t necessarily shown when the IMDb score is grouped by year.

Spotify Plots

As I mentioned before, I listen to a lot of Indian and American music primarily on Spotify. This first plot details the artists I’ve listened to the most amount of times on Spotify for the weeks from February 10th, 2023 to April 6th, 2023 and their ranks, with 1 being my top artist for that week. It shows that I’ve primarily listened to Indian artists, which are colored in shades of orange, and their rankings have fluctuated over time, but the one American artist that is in my top artists, Taylor Swift, has been consistently in my top 3 artists for these weeks and has been my number 1 artist for the last four weeks in these data. Just to note, the gray points denote artists that made it to my top 6 artists but have not consistently stayed in my top artists for these weeks. I also created the second plot above using data from the United States Spotify Weekly Top Artists Chart for these weeks and noticed that while most of the artists have stayed near their previous ranks or gradually changed ranks throughout the weeks, Morgan Wallen has had a sharp rise in rank, going from 6th to 1st in 1 week and staying in the top 2 thereafter. I thought this was interesting because the spike was so sudden– perhaps something happened where more people suddenly wanted to listen to his music, or maybe he had a hit single or album. I also created the third plot above using data from the India Spotify Weekly Top Artists Chart for these same weeks and noticed that the top artists stay consistent in their ranks for the most part, besides one change from the 1st to 2nd week and an inconsistent artist showing up once. This is interesting to see because of all the fluctuation in the top artist ranks in my Spotify data as well as the United States top charts. I know these artists are all very popular in India, but their ranking staying the same is so interesting and could be a sign that Indian Spotify users are very consistent in who they choose to listen to and how often they listen to them. Many of my top artists overlap with those in India’s top chart– A.R. Rahman, Anirudh Ravichander, and Pritam– while only one of my top artists– Taylor Swift– overlaps with those in the United States’ top chart in this time frame. Thus, I would say the artists I listen to fit in more with Indian Spotify users and the popular artists in India. However, I would say that my listening habits– the fluctuation in how much I listen to my top artists over time– aligns more closely with the American Spotify users and their listening habits.

Overall, I think my Netflix watching habits are similar to India’s in terms of the diversity of content consumed– in both my Netflix streaming history and the top 10 weekly content in India, there is a broad variety of Indian and American content consumed. The same applies for watching movies and shows and whether they are Indian or American over time– I have begun to watch more Indian movies and more American shows in recent years, which is consistent with the trends in the Netflix India top charts. My viewing habits for genres, however, differed from both the United States and Netflix India top charts, with my viewing habits being more scattered even in the genres I watch the most. Out of the content I watch, American content seems to have slightly higher average IMDb scores when compared to Indian content, which slightly aligns with the Netflix India top charts, but I can’t really compare myself to the Netflix top charts for the United States because there is only one piece of Indian content in there. For the Spotify charts I made, I would say the fluctuations in my listening habits align with the United States top artist chart, while the artists I listen to the most line up more with the India top artist chart. Overall, it seems like I align more closely with Indian consumption of Netflix content. However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t fit into the United States’ viewing habits at all– I am sure I have watched quite a few of the top shows that appear in the United State’s top chart among other factors. The thought that content from the United States is consumed on a global level, while content from India might not necessarily be, is also an external factor to think about. Although I might have more similarities in certain attributes with the top Netflix content from India, there is still so much I can explore related to this topic, so I still think I am a pretty solid blend of Indian and American culture.